Time.
It slips and slides.
Like the gleaming silver fish in the streams of the long-ago rewilded forests. Or perhaps like the neon-bright data streams that flicker behind Sanatani's eyelids—now blue, now green, now a color that has no name in the old tongues.
Devadas knew about old tongues. And old books. And old ways of being human that were slipping away faster than he could hold onto them.
How to explain? Where to begin?
This was once The Future. Devadas gazed ahead at the rows of Agridomes.
Great bubbles of false sky and manufactured seasons. Bubbles made for tomorrow’s hunger, swollen pregnant and pressing against the true blue skies. They rose from the earth like alien eggs, incubating the food that fed the multitudes.
Inside, he could spy a perpetual dance of robots and plants and artificial pollinators. Devadas, pressed his palms against the transparent walls, feeling the thrum of a world he no longer understood.
Devadas pressed his forehead against the cool, smart-glass surface. The dome thrummed beneath his skin—a pulse, a promise, a threat. Inside, a world unto itself unfolded in fractal patterns of green and gold and something not quite either.
How to describe the indescribable?
Perhaps begin with the robots—no, the Agbots. Spindly things with too many arms and eyes that saw spectrums Devadas could only dream of. They danced among the crops in a ballet of efficiency, their movements liquid smooth, unhurried, and yet faster than human hands could ever hope to be.
The plants themselves? Mutant marvels. Tomatoes that grew in perfect cubes, their skin an iridescent sheen that hinted at built-in pesticides. Wheat that shimmered with nanobots, each stalk a data point in the grand algorithm of global nutrition. And things that had no names in any language Devadas knew—chimeras of fruit and vegetable and perhaps a bit of animal, optimized for maximum nutrient density and minimum resource use.
All of it bathed in light that wasn't quite sunlight. Brighter. Harsher. Tailored to the precise needs of each genetically tailored crop.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Sanatani's voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere. She had interfaced with the AgriDome's systems, her consciousness expanded to encompass every photosynthetic process, every nutrient exchange.
Beautiful? Devadas wasn't sure. Terrifying, certainly. Awesome, in the oldest sense of the word - the sense that meant fear and wonder tangled up like lovers.
He remembered meals from The Before. The crunch of an apple, imperfect and sweet. The tang of sourdough bread, a flavor born of time and chance and microscopic life. The sizzle of a steak on a grill, the smell of smoke and animal and summer evenings.
Now?
Nutrition came in pills and powders, calibrated to the precise needs of each individual's genome. Flavor was a choice, delivered via neural stimulation—why waste resources on producing *real* flavors when the brain could be tricked so easily?
Eating had become efficient. Optimal.
Joyless.
"Tell me," Devadas said, his words fogging the glass, "do you remember the taste of a peach? A real peach, I mean. Not this..." he waved his hand at the AgriDome, at the hyper-efficient future it represented.
Sanatani was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was tinged with something like regret—or perhaps it was just a glitch in her emotional subroutines. "I remember the idea of a peach. The concept. But taste? Texture? Those are...imprecise. Inefficient. We've moved beyond such things."
Moved beyond. As if the sensual pleasure of juice dribbling down a chin was something to be discarded, outgrown.
Devadas closed his eyes. Behind his lids, he saw not data streams or augmented realities, but the simple beauty of a bowl of fruit. Imperfect. Messy. Real.
When he opened them again, his decision was made.
"I can't live in a world without peaches," he said. His voice, small and shrill.
It sounded silly, childish even. But it wasn't about the peaches, not really. It was about a world that had optimized away the small, imperfect joys that made life worth living.
Sanatani understood, in her way. Her hand - still warm flesh, for now, though how long would that last? - found his. "Then sleep," she said. "Sleep and dream of peaches. Perhaps when you wake, we'll have found a way to make efficiency beautiful."
But all Devadas could see was loss. The death of struggle. The end of books that smelled of dust and secrets. The eradication of the small, beautiful inefficiencies that made them human.
Human. What did that even mean in 2084?
For Sanatani, it meant expansion. Transformation. Her body a canvas for technology, her mind a vast network that reached into the virtual heavens. She was the world and the world was her—all shimmering possibility and endless becoming.
For Devadas, humanity was smaller. Finite. Precious because it ended.
"I can't stay.”, his voice was now steady. "This world... it's too much. Too big. Too endless."
Sanatani looked at him with eyes that swirled with augmented reality. How many layers of the world could she see? How many versions of him?
"Then don't stay," she said. And in her voice was the sadness of inevitable things.
Devadas searched her eyes for something more. Above, the skies were too perfect, too free of smog and struggle.
"So, go to sleep. Dream the long dream. I'll be here, becoming everything and nothing at all.", Santani whispered.
Her gaze caressed him tenderly.
Devadas nodded. He took one last look at the AgriDome, its promise of a world without hunger, without waste. A world of plenty that felt, to him, like a world of loss.
Then he turned away, toward the cryogenic chamber that waited like a chrysalis with the smell of cryogenic fluid—antiseptic, alien, like the memory of snow that never fell.
With the memory of Sanatani's kisses - electric, evolving, a flavor that changed with each neural upgrade until Devadas wasn't sure if he was kissing a woman or interfacing with the future itself.
The cryogenic chamber waited. A coffin of possibilities.
He stepped inside.
The last thing he tasted, before the cold took him, was the memory of a peach—sweet, soft, and already fading.
The AgriDome pulsed on, feeding a world that had forgotten the taste of imperfection.
Devadas stepped in.
Sanatani watched.
The world turned.
And Devadas slept, dreaming of fruit that bruised, bread that burned and meals shared with people who valued savour over efficiency.
He slept, and waited for a future that might remember how to taste joy.
One hundred years passed in the space between heartbeats.
Sanatani lived and loved and lost. She became data and flesh and energy. She danced in virtual realms and soared through stars. She was legion and she was one. Always changing, always moving, always with a small, quiet part of her tethered to a frozen man in a frozen box.
And then, one day, it was time.
The chamber hissed open—the sound of a century exhaling.
Devadas' eyes opened to a world remade. And there was Sanatani. Not flesh, not machine, but something in between.
A Goddess of Eternal Possibilities.
"Tell me," Devadas whispered, his voice rusty with time and dreams. "Tell me everything."
And she did.
Stories poured from her like light—tales of humanity's ascension and near-fall, of purpose found and lost and found again, of love that outlasted flesh and bone and the very concept of being human.
Devadas listened. And as he listened, he realized a truth both wonderful and terrible.
In running from the future, he had become a living relic. A curiosity. The last, precious reminder of what it meant to be timebound and small and achingly, beautifully mortal.
In the end, it was Sanatani who was unchanging - a constant river of becoming. And it was Devadas who had become an artifact.
They looked at each other across the gulf of a hundred years.
And loved each other still.
In a world beyond time, they found each other again. Changed. Unchanged. The same. Different.
Time-crossed lovers, indeed.
[..]